The New York Trilogy

  I make no excuse for what happened. Drunkenness is never more than a symptom, not an absolute cause, and I realize that it would be wrong of me to try to defend myself. Nevertheless, there is at least the possibility of an explanation. I am fairly certain now that the things that followed had as much to do with the past as with the present, and I find it odd, now that I have some distance from it, to see how a number of ancient feelings finally caught up with me that afternoon. As I sat there listening to Mrs. Fanshawe, it was hard not to remember how I had seen her as a boy, and once this began to happen, I found myself stumbling onto images that had not been visible to me in years. There was one in particular that struck me with great force: an afternoon in August when I was thirteen or fourteen, looking through my bedroom window into the yard next door and seeing Mrs. Fanshawe walk out in a red two-piece bathing suit, casually unhook the top half, and lie down on a lawn chair with her back to the sun. All this happened by chance. I had been sitting by my window day-dreaming, and then, unexpectedly, a beautiful woman comes sauntering into my field of vision, almost naked, unaware of my presence, as though I had conjured her myself. This image stayed with me for a long time, and I returned to it often during my adolescence: a little boy’s lust, the quick of late-night fantasies. Now that this woman was apparently in the act of seducing me, I hardly knew what to think. On the one hand, I found the scene grotesque. On the other hand, there was something natural about it, even logical, and I sensed that if I didn’t use all my strength to fight it, I was going to allow it to happen.

  There’s no question that she made me pity her. Her version of Fanshawe was so anguished, so fraught with the signs of genuine unhappiness, that I gradually weakened to her, fell into her trap. What I still don’t understand, however, is to what extent she was conscious of what she was doing. Had she planned it in advance, or did the thing just happen by itself? Was her rambling speech a ploy to wear down my resistance, or was it a spontaneous burst of true feeling? I suspect that she was telling the truth about Fanshawe, her own truth at any rate, but that is not enough to convince me—for even a child knows that the truth can be used for devious ends. More importantly, there is the question of motive. Close to six years after the fact, I still haven’t come up with an answer. To say that she found me irresistible would be far-fetched, and I am not willing to delude myself about that. It was much deeper, much more sinister. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if she didn’t somehow sense a hatred in me for Fanshawe that was just as strong as her own. Perhaps she felt this unspoken bond between us, perhaps it was the kind of bond that could be proved only through some perverse, extravagant act. Fucking me would be like fucking Fanshawe—like fucking her own son—and in the darkness of this sin, she would have him again—but only in order to destroy him. A terrible revenge. If this is true, then I do not have the luxury of calling myself her victim. If anything, I was her accomplice.

  It began not long after she started to cry—when she finally exhausted herself and the words broke apart, crumbling into tears. Drunk, filled with emotion, I stood up, walked over to where she was sitting, and put my arms around her in a gesture of comfort. This carried us across the threshold. Mere contact was enough to trigger a sexual response, a blind memory of other bodies, of other embraces, and a moment later we were kissing, and then, not many moments after that, lying naked on her bed upstairs.

  Although I was drunk, I was not so far gone that I didn’t know what I was doing. But not even guilt was enough to stop me. This moment will end, I said to myself, and no one will be hurt. It has nothing to do with my life, nothing to do with Sophie. But then, even as it was happening, I discovered there was more to it than that. For the fact was that I liked fucking Fanshawe’s mother—but in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure. I was consumed, and for the first time in my life I found no tenderness inside me. I was fucking out of hatred, and I turned it into an act of violence, grinding away at this woman as though I wanted to pulverize her. I had entered my own darkness, and it was there that I learned the one thing that is more terrible than anything else: that sexual desire can also be the desire to kill, that a moment comes when it is possible for a man to choose death over life. This woman wanted me to hurt her, and I did, and I found myself revelling in my cruelty. But even then I knew that I was only halfway home, that she was no more than a shadow, and that I was using her to attack Fanshawe himself. As I came into her the second time—the two of us covered with sweat, groaning like creatures in a nightmare— I finally understood this. I wanted to kill Fanshawe. I wanted Fanshawe to be dead, and I was going to do it. I was going to track him down and kill him.

  I left her in the bed asleep, crept out of the room, and called for a taxi from the phone downstairs. Half an hour later I was on the bus back to New York. At the Port Authority Terminal, I went into the men’s room and washed my hands and face, then took the subway uptown. I got home just as Sophie was setting the table for dinner.

  7

  The worst of it began then. There were so many things to hide from Sophie, I could barely show myself to her at all. I turned edgy, remote, shut myself up in my little workroom, craved only solitude. For a long time Sophie bore with me, acting with a patience I had no right to expect, but in the end even she began to wear out, and by the middle of the summer we had started quarreling, picking at each other, squabbling over things that meant nothing. One day I walked into the house and found her crying on the bed, and I knew then that I was on the verge of smashing my life.

  For Sophie, the problem was the book. If only I would stop working on it, then things would return to normal. I had been too hasty, she said. The project was a mistake, and I should not be stubborn about admitting it. She was right, of course, but I kept arguing the other side to her: I had committed myself to the book, I had signed a contract for it, and it would be cowardly to back out. What I didn’t tell her was that I no longer had any intention of writing it. The book existed for me now only in so far as it could lead me to Fanshawe, and beyond that there was no book at all. It had become a private matter for me, something no longer connected to writing. All the research for the biography, all the facts I would uncover as I dug into his past, all the work that seemed to belong to the book—these were the very things I would use to find out where he was. Poor Sophie. She never had the slightest notion of what I was up to— for what I claimed to be doing was in fact no different from what I actually did. I was piecing together the story of a man’s life. I was gathering information, collecting names, places, dates, establishing a chronology of events. Why I persisted like this still baffles me. Everything had been reduced to a single impulse: to find Fanshawe, to speak to Fanshawe, to confront Fanshawe one last time. But I could never take it farther than that, could never pin down an image of what I was hoping to achieve by such an encounter. Fanshawe had written that he would kill me, but that threat did not scare me off. I knew that I had to find him—that nothing would be settled until I did. This was the given, the first principle, the mystery of faith: I acknowledged it, but I did not bother to question it.

  In the end, I don’t think that I really intended to kill him. The murderous vision that had come to me with Mrs. Fanshawe did not last, at least not on any conscious level. There were times when little scenes would flash through my head—of strangling Fanshawe, of stabbing him, of shooting him in the heart—but others had died similar deaths inside me over the years, and I did not pay much attention to them. The strange thing was not that I might have wanted to kill Fanshawe, but that I sometimes imagined he wanted me to kill him. This happened only once or twice—at moments of extreme lucidity—and I became convinced that this was the true meaning of the letter he had written. Fanshawe was waiting for me. He had chosen me as his executioner, and he knew that he could trust me to carry out the job. But that was precisely why I wasn’t going to do it. Fanshawe’s power had to be broken, not submitted to. The point was to prove to him that I no longer cared—that was the crux of it: to treat him
as a dead man, even though he was alive. But before I proved this to Fanshawe, I had to prove it to myself, and the fact that I needed to prove it was proof that I still cared too much. It was not enough for me to let things take their course. I had to shake them up, bring them to a head. Because I still doubted myself, I needed to run risks, to test myself before the greatest possible danger. Killing Fanshawe would mean nothing. The point was to find him alive—and then to walk away from him alive.

  The letters to Ellen were useful. Unlike the notebooks, which tended to be speculative and devoid of detail, the letters were highly specific. I sensed that Fanshawe was making an effort to entertain his sister, to cheer her up with amusing stories, and consequently the references were more personal than elsewhere. Names, for example, were often mentioned—of college friends, of shipmates, of people he knew in France. And if there were no return addresses on the envelopes, there were nevertheless many places discussed: Baytown, Corpus Christi, Charleston, Baton Rouge, Tampa, different neighborhoods in Paris, a village in southern France. These things were enough to get me started, and for several weeks I sat in my room making lists, correlating people with places, places with times, times with people, drawing maps and calendars, looking up addresses, writing letters. I was hunting for leads, and anything that held even the slightest promise I tried to pursue. My assumption was that somewhere along the line Fanshawe had made a mistake—that someone knew where he was, that someone from the past had seen him. This was by no means sure, but it seemed like the only plausible way to begin.

  The college letters are rather plodding and sincere—accounts of books read, discussions with friends, descriptions of dormitory life—but these come from the period before Ellen’s breakdown, and they have an intimate, confidential tone that the future letters abandon. On the ship, for example, Fanshawe rarely says anything about himself—except as it might pertain to an anecdote he has chosen to tell. We see him trying to fit into his new surroundings, playing cards in the dayroom with an oiler from Louisiana (and winning), playing pool in various low-life bars ashore (and winning), and then explaining his success as a fluke: “I’m so geared up not to fall on my face I’ve somehow gone beyond myself. A surge of adrenaline, I think.” Descriptions of working overtime in the engine room, “a hundred and forty degrees, if you can believe it—my sneakers filled up with so much sweat, they squished as though I’d been walking in puddles”; of having a wisdom tooth pulled by a drunken dentist in Baytown, Texas, “blood all over the place, and little bits of tooth cluttering the hole in my gums for a week.” As a newcomer with no seniority, Fanshawe was moved from job to job. At each port there were crew members who left the ship to go home and others who came aboard to take their places, and if one of these fresh arrivals preferred Fanshawe’s job to the one that was open, the Kid (as he was called) would be bumped to something else. Fanshawe therefore worked variously as an ordinary seaman (scraping and painting the deck), as a utility man (mopping floors, making beds, cleaning toilets), and as a messman (serving food and washing dishes). This last job was the hardest, but it was also the most interesting, since ship life chiefly revolves around the subject of food: the great appetites nurtured by boredom, the men literally living from one meal to the next, the surprising delicacy of some of them (fat, coarse men judging dishes with the haughtiness and disdain of eighteenth-century French dukes). But Fanshawe was given good advice by an oldtimer the day he started the job: “Don’t take no shit from no one,” the man said. “If a guy complains about the food, tell him to button it. If he keeps it up, act like he’s not there and serve him last. If that don’t do the trick, tell him you’ll put ice water in his soup the next time. Even better, tell him you’ll piss in it. You gotta let them know who’s boss.”

  We see Fanshawe carrying the captain his breakfast one morning after a night of violent storms off Cape Hatteras: Fanshawe putting the grapefruit, the scrambled eggs, and the toast on a tray, wrapping the tray in tinfoil, then further wrapping it in towels, hoping the plates will not blow off into the water when he reaches the bridge (since the wind is holding at seventy miles per hour); Fanshawe then climbing up the ladder, taking his first steps on the bridge, and then, suddenly, as the wind hits him, doing a wild pirouette—the ferocious air shooting under the tray and pulling his arms up over his head, as though he were holding onto a primitive flying machine, about to launch himself over the water; Fanshawe, summoning all his strength to pull down the tray, finally wrestling it to a position flat against his chest, the plates miraculously not slipping, and then, step by struggling step, walking the length of the bridge, a tiny figure dwarfed by the havoc of the air around him; Fanshawe, after how many minutes, making it to the other end, entering the forecastle, finding the plump captain behind the wheel, saying, “Your breakfast, captain,” and the helmsman turning, giving him the briefest glance of recognition and replying, in a distracted voice, “Thanks, kid. Just put it on the table over there.”

  Not everything was so amusing to Fanshawe, however. There is mention of a fight (no details given) that seems to have disturbed him, along with several ugly scenes he witnessed ashore. An instance of nigger-baiting in a Tampa bar, for example: a crowd of drunks ganging up on an old black man who had wandered in with a large American flag—wanting to sell it— and the first drunk opening the flag and saying there weren’t enough stars on it—”this flag’s a fake”—and the old man denying it, almost grovelling for mercy, as the other drunks start grumbling in support of the first—the whole thing ending when the old man is pushed out the door, landing flat on the sidewalk, and the drunks nodding approval, dismissing the matter with a few comments about making the world safe for democracy. “I felt humiliated,” Fanshawe wrote, “ashamed of myself for being there.”

  Still, the letters are basically jocular in tone (“Call me Redburn,” one of them begins), and by the end one senses that Fanshawe has managed to prove something to himself. The ship is no more than an excuse, an arbitrary otherness, a way to test himself against the unknown. As with any initiation, survival itself is the triumph. What begin as possible liabilities—his Harvard education, his middle-class background—he eventually turns to his advantage, and by the end of his stint he is the acknowledged intellectual of the crew, no longer just the “Kid” but at times also the “Professor,” brought in to arbitrate disputes (who was the twenty-third President, what is the population of Florida, who played left field for the 1947 Giants) and consulted regularly as a source of obscure information. Crew members ask his help in filling out bureaucratic forms (tax schedules, insurance questionnaires, accident reports), and some even ask him to write letters for them (in one case, seventeen love letters for Otis Smart to his girlfriend Sue-Ann in Dido, Louisiana). The point is not that Fanshawe becomes the center of attention, but that he manages to fit in, to find a place for himself. The true test, after all, is to be like everyone else. Once that happens, he no longer has to question his singularity. He is free—not only of others, but of himself. The ultimate proof of this, I think, is that when he leaves the ship, he says goodbye to no one. He signs off one night in Charleston, collects his pay from the captain, and then just disappears. Two weeks later he arrives in Paris.

  No word for two months. And then, for the next three months, nothing but postcards. Brief, elliptical messages scrawled on the back of commonplace tourist shots: Sacré-Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, the Conciergerie. When the letters do begin to come, they arrive fitfully, and say nothing of any great importance. We know that by now Fanshawe is deep into his work (numerous early poems, a first draft of Blackouts), but the letters give no real sense of the life he is leading. One feels that he is in conflict, unsure of himself in regard to Ellen, not wanting to lose touch with her and yet unable to decide how much or how little to tell her. (And the fact is that most of these letters are not even read by Ellen. Addressed to the house in New Jersey, they are of course opened by Mrs. Fanshawe, who screens them before showing them to her daughter—and more of
ten than not, Ellen does not see them. Fanshawe, I think, must have known this would happen, at least would have suspected it. Which further complicates the matter—since in some way these letters are not written to Ellen at all. Ellen, finally, is no more than a literary device, the medium through which Fanshawe communicates with his mother. Hence her anger. For even as he speaks to her, he can pretend to ignore her.) For about a year the letters dwell almost exclusively on objects (buildings, streets, descriptions of Paris), hashing out meticulous catalogues of things seen and heard, but Fanshawe himself is hardly present. Then, gradually, we begin to see some of his acquaintances, to sense a slow gravitation towards the anecdote—but still, the stories are divorced from any context, which gives them a floating, disembodied quality. We see, for example, an old Russian composer by the name of Ivan Wyshnegradsky, now nearly eighty years old— impoverished, a widower, living alone in a shabby apartment on the rue Mademoiselle. “I see this man more than anyone else,” Fanshawe declares. Then not a word about their friendship, not a glimmer of what they say to each other. Instead, there is a lengthy description of the quarter-tone piano in the apartment, with its enormous bulk and multiple keyboards (built for Wyshnegradsky in Prague almost fifty years before, and one of only three quarter-tone pianos in Europe), and then, making no further allusions to the composer’s career, the story of how Fanshawe gives the old man a refrigerator. “I was moving to another apartment last month,” Fanshawe writes. “Since the place was furnished with a new refrigerator, I decided to give the old one to Ivan as a present. Like many people in Paris, he has never had a refrigerator—storing his food for all these years in a little box in the wall of his kitchen. He seemed quite pleased by the offer, and I made all the arrangements to have it delivered to his house—carrying it upstairs with the help of the man who drove the truck. Ivan greeted the arrival of this machine as an important event in his life—bubbling over like a small child— and yet he was wary, I could see that, even a bit daunted, not quite sure what to make of this alien object. ‘It’s so big,’ he kept saying, as we worked it into place, and then, when we plugged it in and the motor started up—’Such a lot of noise.’ I assured him that he would get used to it, pointing out all the advantages of this modern convenience, all the ways in which his life would be improved. I felt like a missionary: big Father Know-It-All, redeeming the life of this stone-age man by showing him the true religion. A week or so went by, and Ivan called me nearly every day to tell me how happy he was with the refrigerator, describing all the new foods he was able to buy and keep in his house. Then disaster. ‘I think it’s broken,’ he said to me one day, sounding very contrite. The little freezer section on top had apparently filled up with frost, and not knowing how to get rid of it, he had used a hammer, banging away not only at the ice but at the coils below it. ‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘I’m very sorry.’ I told him not to fret—I would find a repairman to fix it. A long pause on the other end. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I think maybe it’s better this way. The noise, you know. It makes it very hard to concentrate. I’ve lived so long with my little box in the wall, I feel rather attached to it. My dear friend, don’t be angry. I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done with an old man like me. You get to a certain point in life, and then it’s too late to change.’ “